1. Field of the Invention
The field of my invention is display devices for displaying exercise routines.
2. Statement of the Problems Solved by the Invention
Every year hundreds of thousands of unfit individuals finally decide that it is time to get off the couch and get back in shape. And every month thousands of recuperating accident victims and patients recovering from disease commence physical therapy or occupational therapy programs in order to speed rehabilitation and facilitate recovery. The vast majority of such individuals are not trained athletes, and for them remembering a sequence of exercise tasks in a workout routine and the proper techniques for performing each task of a routine can be a real challenge. Also, individuals who are not trained athletes often have a hard time focusing on their workouts and, consequently, they are easily interrupted and lose track of how may repetitions of an exercise task they have completed, or which tasks have been completed. Even trained athletes can become bored or distracted during lengthy workout sessions, thereby losing concentration and adversely affecting the quality and results of the workout. In addition, there is a growing emphasis in fitness in school children, but they, too, are easily distracted.
For these reasons, trainers and therapists are often employed to lead individuals through exercise workouts, either individually or in small groups. Unfortunately, hiring a trainer/therapist can be too expensive for many individuals; consequently, many individuals who need exercise but who cannot afford a personal trainer/therapist relapse into their corpulent ways or forego beneficial physical therapy.
Another problem encountered by individuals wanting to exercise regularly is that such individuals frequently do not have access to video equipment for playing video exercise demonstration tapes they come to rely on. For instance, individuals on vacation or traveling on business, even if they do carry an exercise video tape with them, find it time-consuming and difficult to find a video system with which to play their exercise video. Therefore, they can easily miss days of exercise and lose ground.
What is needed to overcome these problems is a portable, durable stand-alone exercise routine display system that can be used in any environment, at any time, and wherever the user desires, and that presents personalized workouts to the user, thereby, in effect, substituting as a personal trainer/therapist. Such a device should not just present a video-taped demonstration of an exercise task or a sequence of exercise tasks, it should also be capable of guiding the user through an exercise routine by keeping track of repetitions and maintaining a proper cadence, just as a trainer does. Such a device should have sufficient plasticity that it can display a large number of exercise tasks, including each repetition of each task performed in the proper cadence, and it should display helpful status information such as a timer, the total number of repetitions comprising the task, and the current repetition. In addition, such a device should permit the user to skip, repeat, or return to any exercise task in a routine.
3. Related Art
The art of video demonstrations of exercise routines is old and well-known. For decades body-builders, trainer/therapists, and even movie stars have produced exercise videos for the mass market intended to lead a person through exercise tasks in the privacy of the user's own home. Such mass-produced videos, however, fail to solve the problems described above because the choice of tasks, sequence of tasks, number of repetitions, and cadence are fixed and cannot be personalized to meet the individual user's needs and abilities. Furthermore, such videos require cumbersome video equipment to display the exercise routines.
One common approach to more personalized exercise videos is what may be referred to as “user-driven” video approach. An example of such a user-driven approach is found in U.S. Pat. No. 6,852,068 to Ogawa, which displays cartoon images representing reeling in a big fish at a rate proportionate to changes in the user's heart-lung function while peddling a bicycle-like device. With this approach, it is the user's rate of exercise that drives the video display or otherwise modifies the video display. Such devices, while popular and effective, are not helpful in solving the problems discussed above because the video display “follows” the user rather than “leads” him/her through the exercise routine.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,836,770 to Powers is representative of a low-level “display-driven” approach to video-based training. Powers discloses recording an exercise task from a plurality of angles simultaneously and then presenting all of the views of the task on a split-screen display monitor such that all of the angles are displayed in synchrony. Powers thus allows the user to see each exercise task being properly performed from, for instance, both the front and the back, and the user follows along as the exercises are performed. While this approach may be considered display-driven, it is rudimentary in the sense that the tasks are presented in a fixed sequence and are not adaptable in terms of, for instance, repetition numbers and cadence in order to meet a given user's needs and requirements.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/360,225 of Leeds, now abandoned, discloses a display-driven method for creating customized exercise routines and, hence, represents a higher-level display-driven approach. Leeds discloses producing personalized visual presentations of exercise routines in a digital format by compiling the routines from Internet-accessible digital archives of exercise excerpts wherein the excerpts are categorized according to broad performance capabilities.
Although the Leeds disclosure is insightful with respect to the value of digital libraries of exercise excerpts for producing exercise routines, none of the existing art, including Leeds, discloses a solution to the problem of how to present pre-programmed exercise routines to a user in a manner in which each of the tasks is personalized to meet that specific user's needs. Nor does the existing art teach a system that guides the user through her/his routine by demonstrating each repetition of each task at a cadence that is appropriate to the user's needs, or that empowers the user to modify an exercise routine in real-time. Nor does the existing art disclose a portable, durable stand-alone exercise routine display device.
Clearly, the existing art does not fulfill the functional and structural criteria of a personalized exercise routine display system required to overcome the many problems discussed herein above.